Overview

The winner of the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize, One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away (River Paw Press, 2026) by Martin Willitts Jr., is a poetic tribute to the victims and survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on both historical memory and lived experience, the collection bears witness to the enduring human cost of war and its aftermath.

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Reviews

In 'One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away' Martin Willitts, Jr. has achieved the seemingly impossible through his ability to convey, via poetry, the soft meditations and recollections of Hiroshima through Japanese eyes. These poems of grief, nature, and recollection construct the past and present in a seamless way, against intensely lyric contemplations of silence, burning, suddenness, and preservation. In 'One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away' the poet has managed to tune into the most relevant element of memorialization, with the colors and sounds of Japan, and does so with a revered respect that echoes through the beauty of the language he selects. - Candice Louisa Daquin, author of The Cruelty and Tainted by the Same Counterfeit In One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away Searching for Peace, Martin Willitts, Jr. gives us in bright flashes and quiet meditations the bombing of Hiroshima from the Japanese perspective. With poems of love and grief, cranes and Koi, ghosts and memory, Willitts shapes ""a Zen Garden of well-placed stones. ...allowing time to slipstream"" into patterns that construct lives past and present. In these lush, lyrical contemplations, he ""imagine[s] / silence /burning,"" reminding us that ""[w]e all live within moments of potential suddenness."" Willitts' poems both incinerate and preserve, ""carrying a prayer to where all prayers merge / and become oneness.""- Marjorie Maddox, author of Hover HereThe poems in One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away Searching for Peace are arranged as carefully as the rocks in the Zen gardens that adorn the collection throughout, each poem placed in just the right spot to lead us through the incredible depths of grief and longing in them. Each poem is a stone depicting things like love, loss, pain, memory, language. Ultimately, it is the vulnerability embodied in these poems that helps us to endure that ""you can't always repair what's broken.""- Michael T. Young, author of Mountain Climbing a River

Author Information

Martin Willitts Jr. is the author of twenty-four full-length poetry collections, including the National Ecological Award-winning Searching for What You Cannot See (Hiraeth Press, 2013), the Blue Light Award recipient The Temporary World (2019), and his chapbook One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away (River Paw Press, 2026), the winner of the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. He is also the winner of the Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest (2014), the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize (2018), Editor's Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge (December 2020), and the 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition (2022). His recent books include Love Never Cools When It Is Hot (Red Wolf Editions, 2025), Martin Willitts Jr.: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2024), All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly (Silver Bow Press, 2024), The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Shanti Arts Press, 2024), Leaving Nothing Behind (Fernwood Press, 2023), Rain Followed Me Home (Glass Lyre Press, 2023), and Ethereal Flowers (Shanti Arts Press, 2023). Martin Willitts Jr., who is a retired librarian, trained several librarians for New York State public libraries. He now works as an editor for Comstock Review, serves as a judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition, and lives in Syracuse, New York.

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